


tick tock

by diapason



Series: pian [6]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Angst, Confessions, Doomed Timelines, Hurt No Comfort, Karl Jacobs-centric, Karlnapity, Kinda, M/M, Multi, Pain, Polyamory, Sad Ending, Secrets, Time Loop, Time Shenanigans, Time Travel, Time traveller Karl Jacobs, Timelines, but they cannot save him, his fiances are warm, karl and his future self, karl is cold, omnipotent being using karl as a host lol, so much pain, you have been fucking warned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:28:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29027970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diapason/pseuds/diapason
Summary: Karl really does want to tell his fiances he's a time traveller.It's just that, every time he does, himself from the future comes back to stop him.Time's running out, though. Time's always running out.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs, Alexis | Quackity/Karl Jacobs/Sapnap, Alexis | Quackity/Sapnap, Karl Jacobs/Sapnap
Series: pian [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2132346
Comments: 83
Kudos: 580
Collections: Completed stories I've read, Fanfics I’d eat again at 3 am and already have





	tick tock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Li_the_Panda](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Li_the_Panda/gifts).



> WARNING: EVEN I AM CRYING AT THE ENDING OF THIS ONE
> 
> it seems my calling in life was to just write the most hugely painful stories ever conceived
> 
> anyway enjoy

Of course he wants to tell Nick and Alex. He really does. He wants to.

It’s just that every time he does, _this_ happens.

“Hey, man,” he sighs, not meeting the traveller’s eyes. Neither of them want to be here - it’s obvious. “Same old?”

“Sorry,” his own voice shoots back at him, “it’s not a _bad_ one this time, but they don’t take it well.”

“Sap or Quackity?”

“It’s Quackity this time. He hits you and he gets mad about his teeth and he goes to tell Tubbo.”

“And Tubbo…?”

“Tubbo has you jailed. He wanted to - do experiments, I guess, he was talking about an electric chair and - well, I broke out.”

“On your own?”

“Sapnap was a couple blocks into mining a staircase to the cell when I met him.”

“Oh.”

It’s always different. One or both of his fiances, though, always has a problem with the big reveal, and Karl always has to come back to tell himself not to do it before he dies. Karl’s lucky, he supposes, that he’s been stopped so many times - it might mean he’s The Karl that makes it out the other end of this timeline, the Karl that actually survives this mess.

At the price of his lovers never knowing his true identity.

He’s heard a dozen different versions of this story. Sapnap burns bridges or runs back to George and Dream or yells, with searing hurt in his tone, about the messes Karl should have been there to prevent, not stopping his blazing fury for the second it would take Karl to explain that he’s tried, oh god has he tried, a hundred times he’s tried to step in and solve the issues that he’s well aware are coming. The way he shoved himself into governing bodies where he didn’t belong for a chance to speak to the President before the boy did something that would change his best friend irreparably. The times he’d asked for just a minute of important people’s time that they refused to give him, always distracted by another problem, never aware that Karl held answers they could never grasp alone. The moments when he looks down and for a second his hands are stained bright and blocky, losing form, losing function, losing himself to the spiral until sometimes it’s the only thing that consumes his mind, the desperate need to right all wrongs and make this timeline perfect, even if it kills him to try.

Quackity, though. His anger is rarer. Usually he’s distant, cold, withdrawn. Usually his eyes flash with memories of the deaths he’s experienced and the lives he’s taken, and he drops a few curt words about how Karl must not love them enough to tell them about this part of himself. Karl’s never been there for that part, and yet he can see it clear as day in his mind’s eye how his smallest partner straightens up, face steely, and re-enters prosecutor mode, ready to punish Karl for his wrongs, ready to bring the time-traveller the justice he doesn’t really deserve (and yet maybe he does, maybe he ought to be imprisoned and tortured and executed, maybe he needs it if it’s been months and the timeline’s still this messed up). He’s heard about a time or two when his fiance exploded in his face and let him have it for the secret he’s been hiding, and honestly it’s more gratifying to hear when he’s avoiding that than a time like this, where Alex just shuts down his emotions and runs on back to the nearest figure of authority he can reach.

He wonders, if Dream wasn’t in the prison, if Quackity would be going to him too.

The other Karl shuffles, and he meets his doppelganger’s eyes. He’s worn, world-weary, eyes dull and hoodie oversized, the way he likes it (because he’s the tallest of his little group and maybe he likes to feel a little small the way the others are sometimes, okay?). Tears are welling at the edges, and Karl understands completely.

“I’m sorry, man.”

“No. I was stupid. I’ve been you all my life, I knew it was the wrong idea, I knew I’d be coming back to tell you not to before morning came.”

“So why’d you do it?”

He doesn’t have to speak. The word _love_ floats between them, unreachable.

They love their partners so much that the urge to explain it all, to make them empathise, make them share his pain would have overtaken Karl months ago if it weren’t for - if it weren’t for these visits, every time, without fail.

“Sometimes I think it’s too late,” the other Karl admits, smiling, and he looks so small and cold.

“I know.”

“Hey, man, let me talk, I don’t have long.”

And he’s right. So Karl pats the side of the bed where he’s sitting and lets his future self join him.

“You know? Like, we shoulda told them at the start. We should have said something _months_ ago. They’re never gonna not be mad at this point.”

“We’ve never tried visiting the past, have we?”

“No. I think that’d freak them out. Freak us out, too.”

Karl laughs. “That’s why. We’ve never gone back and told them because we never saw that happen. If it’s not already true, we never can, right?”

“I guess. Closed loop.”

“That might be…”

The other Karl picks up his sentence, as if they’re one and the same. “... why every time we visit someone new…”

_Everybody dies._

A town, hastily shoved into the timeline, unable to sustain itself under constraints of temporal logic, and lost to exploded ruins.

A village, for whom his very presence was enough to induce madness, springing forth killers and paranoia in the innocent until none survived but the bloodiest.

An island, where peaceful beachgoers were driven to find the secret treasure of a famed and feared pirate, egged on by Karl to embody the dead man’s violent spirit until they found the weapon that would slay them all except the one who held it.

A city, hundreds of years in the future, guarded by a madman that followed the spirit of Dream long after the godlike figure’s power had faded, home to the doom of three humble fishermen, and to the one whose body Karl had possessed.

_Everybody dies, except the ones who kill._

It frightens him, most days, the way the stories he visits are bolder memories than the ones he’s crafted in the present day. The way the here-and-now is starting to fuzz around the edges. The way he’ll look down and he’ll see the hands of something less than human, less than him, less than -

“I don’t think we had long anyway,” says the other Karl, and he’s terrifyingly right.

“What am I gonna do, man?” he whispers.

“I don’t know. All I know is that you can’t tell Alex, and that means you can’t tell Nick either.”

The other Karl’s tears are filling up his voice. He swallows back the flood.

“Be brave, man. You’re the smart one. I’m just the guy who got too caught up in love to remember why we keep this thing a secret.”

Karl looks himself dead in the eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“No. Don’t make my mistake. You know the drill, Karl Jacobs.”

“I’m sorry it was you and not me.”

“Hey, hey, it’s okay! It was always gonna end up this way, right?”

He blinks away tears of his own. “I guess.”

The other Karl starts to melt.

It never gets easier to see himself die. The way he closes his eyes, shuddering, finally feeling himself die the way he’s watched it play out a dozen times before when he was the same guy that’s watching now, and knowing the pain Karl hopes he never will. The way his features liquify, the way he drips from white skin and brown hair to luminescent purple and orange and green, spiralling and swirling until his features are unrecognisable. The way he can’t reach out, because he’s come back to tell himself about that one, too, already half dead on arrival, terrified and desperately insisting that he never touch this process, because it fucking _spreads._ Karl pulls at his hoodie sleeves instead and tries not to remember that the man who’s melting before him is _him_ but for a few hours and a single bad decision.

They had longer than usual this time, but it wasn’t enough to say everything, and Karl watches the other Karl die, and takes a shivering breath to see the puddle seep into the fabric of spacetime and spiral into nothingness.

The anomaly is corrected.

Karl threw up, the first time it happened, but this time he just sits in quiet, chilled disgust.

The house is silent and the light’s getting lower.

If he listens close enough, his heart ticks a rhythm. The beat of choices made, the march of seconds passing, the squeeze of How Things Ought To Be wrapping around his veins like a vice until he can barely breathe some days. The clock in the spiral reminds him that his life is precious, and any day now he could be the Karl that spends his last few moments warning himself what not to do before he finds out how it feels to be corrected. The spiral reminds him that he’s lucky he’s the one who got this far. The spiral reminds him that he’s lucky he was chosen to host it in the first place. The spiral ticks a rhythm, mockingly.

Karl knows if he opens his eyes he’ll only see too-real visions of the formless, featureless end of his future, blocky and inhuman, so he rolls over and goes to sleep.

“Karlos?”

He wakes up cold, under two blankets. He can’t quite bring himself to turn around and see the man who he knows would be advocating for his torture in another timeline.

“Karl, baby, it’s not that late, did you go to bed already?” He’s slipped out of the Spanish cadence he always puts on when they’re exchanging pet names, or when it’s just the two of them, after dark, and Karl pushes the right buttons to coax his lover into foreign strings of praise and platitudes. Now he just sounds familiarly nasal and warm.

“No,” he calls, muffled through the fabric.

“I can hear you’re in the pillow, Karl.”

“I’m not,” he lies.

“Karlos. Guapito. Mi amor. What the fuck is going on with you?”

Karl stares into the wall and tries very hard not to cry, because that’s the voice of the man who would have him killed.

“Baby?”

“I had a nightmare,” is the lie he settles on, and he can hear Alex deflate through the door, envision the way his shoulders fall and his expression softens.

“I’m coming in. You want me to get Sapnap?”

“No,” insists Karl, above the sound of his lock being picked - god damn it, Quackity. “I’m fine.”

“Baby, you wanna tell me that again?” The door creaks and he’s approached, the weight of a figure settling behind him that makes his mattress dip, the heavy warmth of a hand on his tensed shoulder reminding him just how cold his skin is under all these layers. He’s always cold, it seems, especially after he -

after anomalies happen.

He swallows what’s clogging up his throat. “I’m all good.”

“Really?”

“Really really.”

“Wanna tell me what happened in the dream?”

And his first instinct is _absolutely not,_ spare the man his peace of mind, because he knows that if this timeline’s destined to survive and not be cut off unceremoniously by a faux pas of fate, he needs to keep it ix-nay on the imetravel-tay.

And yet -

“I was talking to myself.”

Alex is quiet. Patient. Warm.

“Like, another me. He told me - he… uh, he told me a story. About you and Nick.”

“A sad story?” asks Quackity. Soft. Loving. Calm.

“A very sad story. You were mad at me. And I wanted to fix it, but I can’t fix it.”

Quackity hums, back-channelling his attention.

“And then the other me died.”

There is quiet.

“I’m not mad at you, baby,” his lover finally says, shifting slightly out of Karl’s field of vision, “I could never be mad at you. If I had a problem, I would just tell you about it, and we could fix it together. You’re all good in my hands.”

And _yes, I know,_ he wants to scream, _but what if you couldn’t fix things by my side? What if I was alone?_

The spiral ticks with every second Karl doesn’t reply. It likes to taunt him with the rhythm only he can hear while he’s around the people he wants to trust. It’s mean, sometimes.

“I love you,” he says instead.

“I love you,” Alex smiles, patting an icy, un-thawable shoulder, and lays himself back across Karl’s legs.

“What are you doing, nimrod?”

“I messaged Sapnap. He’s coming over.”

“I told you I was fine!”

“Too late. He’s coming.”

“You’re so mean to me,” Karl jokes, and the smile is skin-deep. This cold won’t leave his bones for nothing.

They lie like that, quiet, breathing, warm on cold, for five hundred and thirty-four ticks (he counts, with nothing better to say) before the door swings open again and his other fiance fills the room.

“Who do I need to smack?”

That should bring a real, glowing grin to Karl’s face, with the ridiculous chivalry of it all, but the smile dies before it can reach his lips, because the answer is _Alex, apparently._

And a child.

And at the same time nobody at all.

Maybe the spiral, for cursing him in the first place?

_(You’re lucky,_ ticks a warning, harsh in his ear like the drums of war.)

So it goes, the evening passing uneventfully, three medium-sized men sharing one big bed and drinking one another in, pampering Karl until he can start to forget the things he’s seen and the things he’ll have to go through one day, because this timeline’s one in infinity, and the chances that he’s The Karl who makes it out are thus infinitely small. Still, he takes that one as seriously as time itself, and so he says nothing about his affliction, and he smiles under Sapnap’s all-encompassing hold, and he rolls his eyes at Quackity’s overly sexual manner of speech, and he pretends that everything’s fine.

They’ll get married soon, and he’ll have to move in. They’ll ask questions, then. They’ll wonder where he goes and what he does and how he disappears without a trace for hours at a time. They’ll ask questions and he’ll have to lie until it hurts _(as if it doesn’t hurt already)_ because he’s just not ready to find out what it’s like to be on the other side of melting, to be corrected.

Now, though, he can live alone and try fruitlessly, aimlessly, yet endlessly, to make this timeline better, to set in motion every cog that has to turn before he dies, to bring back the dead (and there have been so many dead, so many times he’s seen the purple grip his skin like a climbing stain as he _wrenches_ innocent children back from the dead and makes a few ghosts along the way, too, so many times he’s cheated death for others), to create the world where _everybody lives_ with his own bare hands if necessary, if it takes every last bit of his humanity. He can work long nights until it feels like his pupils are spiralled out. He can write and write about the tales he visits and tries to save until his memory of the present fogs into obscurity, until he’s not sure if the friends he’s talking to were born now or four hundred years ago, until he forgets all names and until faces blur. History repeats too often for Karl to keep track of what’s now. Everybody sounds the same.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

Nick offers him a kiss on the cheek, and he quirks his lip to receive it, and ice runs down his brainstem.

It’s not fair, that they will die, and he will move on, forgetting as easily as he breathes.

It’s not fair, that they will wonder where he’s going, and he will tell them it’s nothing to worry about, lying as easily as he blinks.

It’s not fair, that the next time he considers coming clean the spiral will _punish_ him again for loving too much by forcing him to watch himself die, over and over until he learns his lesson in the one perfect timeline where it -

No.

You know what?

Life’s not worth living with a curse like this.

“I can travel through time,” he spits out selfishly, through the curtain of ice water that’s been weighing him down all day, and his fiances freeze.

(Two hours later, wandering the hills of the Outer Dream SMP, cast out by a flaming Sapnap, he’ll settle into the pull of the spiral and face himself.

“Already?” says the figure on the bed, shuddering. “The last one just left.”

“It’s not worth it, man,” he grimaces, already feeling the crippling, uncanny liquidity that will soon correct him into absolute nothingness, “I had to tell them. The spiral’s using you. You’re never gonna be whole again, not even if you fix it all.”

“Jeez, what happened?”

“I did the only thing that was right. And it was worth it. You can’t keep them. You’ll never get to keep them.”

He's doomed his entire timeline by leaving it. It is bitterly selfishly _worth it_ to kill a whole reality for love.

“I’m sorry,” offers the other Karl, the lucky Karl.

Except - no. He is the lucky one, he decides.

It’s the last thing he thinks, his last cry out to an uncaring universe, before he dissolves into the universe and is corrected.

The spiral’s beat ticks on.)


End file.
